Hi!
I've had an AIDC 3731 downconverter, one converted by K5GNA, for just over a year. I haven't used it until tonight, when I had some free time in the evening. I took it and a bunch of stuff to my stepson's Boy Scout meeting (a church in grid DM43ap, northeast Phoenix), and hoped to work an AO-51 pass while he was in his meeting.
After a storm blew through Phoenix (it kept me off an SO-50 pass around 0220 UTC), the skies cleared enough to make a try at the AO-51 pass around 0320 UTC. I set up my station, and waited for the satellite.
TX was my IC-W32A HT at 5W, turning off the 70cm side of the radio, into my Arrow Antennas 2m/70cm handheld Yagi. RX was with the downconverter into a Yaesu VX-2R (I could disable TX on this radio, to protect the downconverter - plus it had an attenuator). I had a 6dB attenuator in the coax line, along with the VX-2R's attenuator function, so the S-meter wasn't moving much until I heard the satellite. Once I found the downlink, it wasn't hard to keep up with it through the pass. I let the downconverter with its dipole and corner reflector sit on the car's roof, and had a splitter from the VX-2R's speaker-mic jack to feed an earpiece and my Sony digital recorder.
I heard one QSO finish up, then I made a call. Angelo N5UXT in New Orleans heard me and I worked him first, then I was called by WA4EWV. I heard a W9HT toward the end of the pass, but could not work that station. I could follow the Doppler on the RX signal well enough, and every so often the signal would take a dip and then come back up. If I held the downconverter and twisted it, I could get the signal back up, but most of the time I just set it on the roof in the general direction of AO-51 and held the Yagi in one hand and a speaker-mic into my IC-W32A with the other hand. I really wish I had a small camera or camcorder with me, to get a photo of my "station", but at least I have an audio recording of the pass with my 2 contacts.
I am impressed with how well the downconverter worked, and with AO-51 in this V/S configuration. This was the first time I did anything that used a ham frequency above 23cm. I'm hoping to have some time Friday morning to work an AO-51 pass and try this again, but if that's not possible I want to work some passes this weekend before the mode change. This was fun!
73!
Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK - Phoenix, Arizona USA http://www.wd9ewk.net/